I am getting questions from friends and acquaintances about whether the US’s supply chain woes are over. Afterall, port congestion has cleared, transportation costs have gone down, we are seeing far fewer product shortages, and the looming recession will likely take some of the pressure off hiring and retention woes. The people I talk to […]
Pure Storage never stocked out during the pandemic. That was not because demand for their products tanked. Product sales were down by 8%, but the company did grow by 2% overall in the last fiscal year based on strong performance in subscription services. While demand from many customer’s decreased, some of their customers did place […]
A Hi-Tech Company’s Control Tower Helped It Better Manage Air Cargo During the Worst Days of the Pandemic In 2014, one of the world’s largest high-tech manufacturers started thinking about a digital transformation that would help them better serve their customers while also generating operational efficiencies. From a supply chain perspective, a robust supply chain […]
In March I provided a brief overview of the global trade management (GTM) solutions market and discussed some of the factors that encourage companies to invest in these solutions. There are a few “independent variables” that can explain GTM sales. Among them are regulation and compliance complexity, regulatory fine risks, supply chain complexity, and tariff […]
IBM manages more than $30 billion a year as part of its supply chain, with thousands of supply chain managers and analysts worldwide. IBM is using Watson and huge troves of weather and location data – IBM acquired The Weather Company last year – to improve their supply chain risk management program.
Outsourcing is very common in supply chain management. But one thing very few companies outsource is demand management. In fact, until I talked to Lori Pouquette, the vice president of global customer operations at Xilinx, I had never heard of a company outsourcing demand management processes.
Dell has a complex supply chain. And, this complexity has, over time, had a corrosive effect on Dell’s order fulfillment performance. In Dell’s case, when they dug into this by talking to customers, what they heard over and over was “I want you to build, ship, and deliver what I ordered, when you said you would.”
